1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for allowing a user to indicate actions associated with multimedia content. In particular, the present invention relates to a system and method for receiving pen input from a user indicating actions associated with the multimedia content.
2. Description of the Background Art
Conventional printers receive documents and multimedia documents in a variety of formats and print the contents of the documents in accordance with a proper format. For example, a printer enabled to print PostScript documents will correctly interpret Postscript commands within a document so that the document has the appearance expected by its author when it is printed. (Postscript is a trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated).
Today, storage and retrieval of multimedia documents is becoming problematic. A librarian, for example, may have a large number of multimedia documents, such as video files, to store. It is difficult for the librarian to continually retrieve videos for library users. Moreover, it is difficult for a library user to locate the portion of a video that he wished to view. Currently, the librarian stores the physical videos on a shelf and retrieves them when the library user needs them. The library user will then need to scan through each video, looking for the particular item or segment that he wants. This is not efficient and is prone to human error. In addition, the user must obtain a copy of the actual video stored on a medium such as tape, CD, or DVD in order to view the video and the user must further be supplied with a viewer of some kind in order for the user to be able to view the video.
U.S. application Ser. No. 10/660,867, filed Sep. 12, 2003, B. Erol, J. Graham, J. J. Hull, and D. S. Lee, “Using Paper Documents Printed Before a Presentation to Access Multimedia Information Captured During a Presentation,” describes how a printout of presentation slides can be generated before a presentation takes place so that users can take notes on those slides during the presentation and how bar codes on those notes can be used for later replay of a recording of the presentation. This application is incorporated by reference herein. This system matches images of slides captured at print-time with images of slides captured by a presentation recorder to determine the time stamps that correspond to bar codes on the printed document.
What is needed is a system and method that can store multimedia content in a manner that allows easy storage, retrieval, and control of playback of the multimedia content. Ideally, the system would allow for annotation of multimedia content with or without having to simultaneously view the content.